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Data from the 1994 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) and the Strategic Alternative Learning Techniques (SALT) center at the University of Arizona. Wage differentials studies have typically focused on male/female or white/non-white wage differentials, where laws protect the employment relationship for these groups. By the same token, both the American with Disabilities Act (1990) and title V of the Rehabilitation Act (1973) legally protect people with learning disabilities (LD) in all aspects of the employment relationship. Many adults with LD state that they fear labor market discrimination against them. We study whether or not this fear is justified. This paper is the first in which researchers decompose a wage differential between groups of adults with and without LD. We introduce a data set on individuals with documented LD and then we compare these individuals to a control group in order to decompose the wage differential between college graduates with and without LD. Our results show that the standard wage decomposition indicates an unexplained wage gap, but we find that the gap is not statistically different than zero when analyzing the variance of the decomposition components. Furthermore, additional regression analysis indicates that employers who are aware of their employees LD do not pay significantly lower wages to these workers. We conclude that any fear of labor market discrimination against persons with LD is not a wage discrimination but either a pre-market discrimination or an internal labor market discrimination.

Bibliography Citation

Dickinson, David L. and Roelant L. Verbeek. "Wage Differentials Between College Graduates With and Without Learning Disabilities." Journal of Learning Disabilities 35,2 (March-April 2002): 175-184.